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Canned Apples
2 pints water juice and rind of 2 lemons Pare and core the apples; cover with cold water. Boil sugar and water five minutes; add apples and simmer until tender; add lemon juice and rind; place apples in sterilized jars; fill to overflowing with syrup; adjust rubbers and covers; set in a cool place until cool then keep in dark dry closet.
This is an open-kettle preserving method of the sort that current food-safety guidance has abandoned outright, and the text as printed is also missing most of its ingredient list. The notes below explain the specific failures rather than offering a working version.
- The ingredient list is incompleteOnly water and lemons survive in the printed text. The quantity of apples and the quantity of sugar, both essential to the syrup's density and therefore to how the fruit keeps, are simply absent. Nothing can be scaled or judged from what remains.
- No processing step at allThe jars are filled hot, sealed, and set aside to cool. There is no boiling-water bath, no processing time, and no temperature anywhere in the instructions. The seal depends entirely on the vacuum drawn by cooling syrup, which is not a reliable barrier.
- Open-kettle filling contaminates the jarLadling hot fruit into a jar exposes the headspace and the sealing surface to airborne yeast and mold spores. High-acid fruit will not support C. botulinum, but heat-resistant molds such as Byssochlamys survive this treatment comfortably and will spoil sealed jars of fruit in syrup.
- Rubbers and covers"Adjust rubbers and covers" refers to the flat rubber gasket rings used with glass-lidded and zinc-capped jars of the period. Such closures fall outside current tested canning guidance, and rings salvaged from old jars cannot be trusted to seal.
- The storage instruction is a tellA cool place to cool, then a dark dry closet. Cool, dark storage was the standard direction of the period, and jars put up without processing had to be inspected for spoilage before use.
- If you want canned applesUse a current tested recipe from a food-preservation authority, with a stated jar size, headspace, and processing time. There is no way to patch this text into one.
Lowney's Cook Book was written by Maria Willett Howard and published in 1907 for the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate manufacturer, which is why so much of it revolves around cocoa and confectionery. The missing sugar and apple quantities look like a printing failure rather than anything the author intended. The method itself was standard domestic practice at the time: fruit cooked in syrup and packed hot into glass jars closed with a rubber ring, a system that spread through American kitchens after mid-century as machine-made jars and gaskets became cheap. Apples were an obvious candidate, since a household buying them by the barrel in autumn had to do something with them before spring, and their acidity made them among the more forgiving things a cook could put up. The open-kettle technique was displaced through the twentieth century by measured boiling-water and pressure processing, and by the two-piece metal lid.